Vintage Pelikan Pens

Günther Wagner co-founded the Pelikan musician offer company in Hanover, Germany in 1878, nonetheless it ended up beingn’t until 1929 that firm produced its very first water feature pen. Other companies, including Waterman, Parker, Sheaffer, Wahl, and Montblanc, had all outdone Pelikan to market, but Pelikan joined the fray with an innovation—a pen with a competent telescoping piston-filler. With a piston-filler, a turn of a knob ended up being all it took to suck ink into a pen, which is why piston-filler pens are occasionally referred to as twist-fillers. The innovation belonged to an engineer called Theodor Kovacs, just who offered his patent to Wagner.

Pelikan’s very first pencils had been cigar-shaped samples of the German modernist movement promoted by the Bauhaus college. Pens from 12 months 1929 had been manufactured from Bakelite—Pelikan switched to tough rubberized and a synthetic called celluloid in 1930, which is one of the numerous reasons why the 1929 pencils are coveted by collectors of classic Pelikans.

That first year, Pelikan pencils had been offered just in most black colored (the conservative palette was a winner with German businessmen) or black colored with a jade-green barrel. Marbled-green drums emerged a little later on as they are more widespread than pencils with jade drums, however the colors among these pencils have faded and altered over the years, therefore sometimes it can be hard to inform that will be which.

By 1931, these early pens could be labeled as Pelikan 100s. The hard-rubber hats now arrived in plain or banded designs and the colors of drums expanded to include blue and gold. 1931 has also been the year Pelikan began making luxury designs, initial that had been the 111. These pencils had patterned, guilloché barrels of 14-karat silver. One of the more collectible Pelikan 111s could be the Toledo, which showcased Moorish metalwork with a pelican incorporated to the design, instead of just machine-made patterns. After 1937, Pelikan circulated a Toledo type of the 100N.

The 110 that then followed the 100 had a white-gold-filled limit, although the 112 ended up being gold throughout, excluding the piston device, which stayed black colored. Another variant ended up being the 101, which emerged in celluloid drums resembling lizard skin, tortoise shell, or coral. Some barrels had been clear therefore the ink reservoir could be quickly viewed. By 1939, Pelikan ended up being making use of celluloid in practically all its pencils’ pieces, through the caps to your barrels into the filler knobs themselves.

Pelikan water fountain pens are good looking enough and they feel great in the hand, but one of the things Pelikan enthusiasts like the majority of about these pencils will be the nibs. Particularly, classic Pelikan nibs which are flexible and oblique tend to be highly prized. Interestingly, the slant of most oblique nibs was designed for right-handed article writers, so lefties will have to buy a "left-oblique" to be able to make use of the pen properly.

The Pelikan 100 and all sorts of its incarnations had been the business’s mainstay before belated 1940s. After World War II, the clip on the limit of Pelikan pencils became significantly even more pelican-beak-like. In 1950, Pelikan launched the 400—its signature feature ended up being a pinstriped barrel (giving people a peek at the ink supply) in colors including green to tortoise. For accountants, a model was created with a red tip on the limit, to signal to users the red-ink within the barrel...

In 1955, as a hedge up against the coming onslaught of ballpoint pencils, Pelikan produced a Roller version of the 400, however the business was quite late towards the party. After getting started as an innovator, Pelikan was today using a go-slow strategy with models just like the 500, 520, 600, and 700, which, despite becoming handsome, had been all simply the exact same 400 pen with different levels of silver inside their caps and figures.